Amazing disconnect at Conservation Law Foundation

The July 26 newsletter from New England's Conservation Law Foundation reports that a Vermont judge ruled that construction of the "circumferential highway" ("the Circ") around Burlington must remain halted until an adequate environmental review is completed. The CLF "has opposed the Circ since 2002, arguing that the highway will not solve transportation problems in the area. Instead, the Circ will cause more sprawl and more pollution."

The newsletter also hails the Massachusetts Senate endorsement of the Massachusetts Ocean Act to "govern development activities and foster environmentally sustainable uses of marine resources in Massachusetts waters while protecting public trust resources." As the CLF notes,

Recent proposals for liquefied natural gas terminals, sand and gravel mining, desalinization plants, gas pipelines, telecommunications cables, tidal and wind energy facilities have raised numerous concerns among local, state and federal agencies, and the general public about how to manage the diversity of uses and the impacts of this intensified development pressure on the marine ecosystem. [emphasis added]

But the CLF is also sad, because inadequate environmental review, like that keeping the Circ on hold, as well as numerous concerns among the general public about the impacts of development pressure, like those in Massachusetts' ocean, has caused the denial of a permit to erect four giant wind turbines on East Mountain in the wilds of northeast Vermont.

The project will not solve energy or pollution problems in the area and will instead cause more sprawl and visual pollution.

CLF has clearly, insanely, taken the wrong side on the issue of industrial wind power.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont

Wind project thrown out in West Virginia

Word comes from West Virginia that the state Public Service Commission (PSC) has thrown out an application to erect 50 giant wind turbines (400 feet tall, 2 megawatts each, sprawling along 6.5 miles of ridgelines) on Jack Mountain. Congratulations, Friends of Beautiful Pendleton County and Citizens for Responsible Windpower !

The application by Liberty Gap Wind Force, a subsidiary of U.S. Wind Force, represented by notorious coal lobbyist Frank Maisano, was rejected because the company would not allow an independent hydrology consultant on the proposed site.

Wind Force claims that they required a liability waiver to allow the hydrologist on the site, but Friends of Beautiful Pendleton County noted that they had allowed PSC staff on the site without such a waiver. The PSC recognized it as a delaying tactic and "unreasonable and contrary to the public interest." They also cited "repeated unreasonable behavior."

Hearings were scheduled to begin next month but have now been canceled.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism

Hezbollah did not venture into Israel

Thanks to Sam Smith's Progressive Review, we now know that the claim that Hezbollah went into Israel to kidnap 2 soldiers is yet another lie. The soldiers were arrested for illegally entering southern Lebanon, and bombing by Israel was already in progress.

July 12, Hindustan Times:
The Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement announced on Wednesday that its guerrillas have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. "Implementing our promise to free Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, our strugglers have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon," a statement by Hezbollah said. "The two soldiers have already been moved to a safe place," it added. The Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were captured as they "infiltrated" into the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border.

July 12, Bahrain News Agency:
The Lebanese Hezbollah movement announced Wednesday the arrest of two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were arrested as they entered the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border. Israeli aircraft were active in the air over southern Lebanon, police said, with jets bombing roads leading to the market town of Nabatiyeh, 60 kilometers south of Beirut.

July 12, Yahoo:
According to the Lebanese police force, the two soldiers were captured in Lebanese territory, in the area of Aïta Al-Chaab close to the border, whereas Israeli television indicated that they had been captured in Israeli territory.

Blasted by a missile on the road to safety

From The Guardian (U.K.):

Family ordered to flee were targeted because they were driving minivan


The ambulanceman gave Ali the job of keeping his mother alive. The 12-year-old did what he could. "Mama, mama, don't go to sleep," he sobbed, gently patting her face beneath her chin. Behind her black veil, her eyelids were slowly sinking. "I'm going to die," she sighed. "Don't say that, mama," Ali begged, and then slid to the ground in tears.

On the pavement around mother and son were the other members of the Sha'ita family, their faces spattered with each other's blood. All were in varying shades of shock and injury. A tourniquet was tied on Ali's mother's arm. A few metres away, his aunt lay motionless, the white T-shirt beneath her abaya stained red. Two sisters hugged each other and wept, oblivious to the medics tending their wounds. "Let them take me, let them take me," one screamed.

Their mother was placed on a stretcher, and lifted into the ambulance. "God is with you, mama," Ali said. She reached up with her good arm to caress his face.

The Sha'itas had thought they were on the road to safety when they set out yesterday, leaving behind a village which because of an accident of geography -- it is five miles from the Israeli border - had seemed to make their home a killing ground. They had been ordered to evacuate by the Israelis. ...

Plumes of smoke rise in the distance, and the road in front of us offers up signs of closer peril: car wrecks, still smoking after Israeli strikes, and abandoned vehicles with shattered rear windows. Some were direct hits by Israeli aircraft. Others were drivers who had lost control. Overhead is the menacing roar of Israeli warplanes and the buzz of drones tracking every movement.

With bridges on the main coastal roads severed by Israeli air strikes, and secondary mountain routes scarred by craters, the means of escape for Lebanese trying to follow Israel's orders are limited. "All the smaller roads leading to the coastal roads are destroyed," said a spokesman for the UN in the border town of Naqoura. "In some areas you have people pushing cars by hand through obstacles made by a rocket or a bomb." By yesterday afternoon, for many villagers, there was truly no way out.

Death came crashing into the Sha'ita family soon after 10am, in the form of an Israeli anti-tank missile, seemingly fired from an Israeli helicopter high overhead, in Kafra, about nine miles from their home. Those passengers who were not killed or injured by shards of burning metal were hurt when the van plunged into the side of a hill.

In their village of et-Tiri, the Sha'itas were an extended clan of 54 people. Between them they had three cars. When the Israeli evacuation order came, in leaflets shot out of aircraft, the family planned at first to stay. "We were at home living our lives," said Musbah Sha'ita, Ali's uncle.

By 7pm on Saturday night, the deadline set by Israel for people in about a dozen villages in south Lebanon to leave, the Sha'itas were close to panic. "Whoever could run was running," said Mr Sha'ita. "I pushed them to go."

One of their fleeing neighbours said he would send transport for them, and the next morning all 54 of the Sha'itas set out in a convoy of three white minivans. That choice of transport proved a fatal mistake.

In their leaflet campaign, the Israelis have warned repeatedly they would consider minivans, trucks and motorcyles as targets. "The minivans are a target for Israel because they can take Katyusha rockets for Hizbullah, so they do not contemplate too long," the UN official said. "They just shoot it."

Dozens of others have met a similar fate as Israeli F-16 jet fighters and attack helicopters intensify a campaign meant to cut off the supply of Hizbullah rockets, and the movement of its fighters.

But Israel's offensive is being felt across a much wider swath of south Lebanon. The Lebanese Red Cross in Tyre said 10 cars carrying civilians and three or four motorcycles had been hit by Israeli missiles yesterday. Red Cross ambulances were no safer; a spokesman said an ambulance had narrowly escaped a missile near the village of el-Qlaile, south of the city. A number of the dead, including the three members of the Sha'ita family, remained trapped in their cars because it was too dangerous to retrieve their bodies. ...

Evil intent

"With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places."

That's from the description by Thomas Pynchon of his new book, Against the Day, set in the years from 1893 to the early 1920s, which is scheduled to be published December 5.

Big difference between green tags and wind energy

Recently, the National Geographic Society and the New York Audubon society, like many companies, such as Whole Foods and Tom's of Maine, have claimed that they are buying "wind power." But in fact they are only buying "green tags."

Green tags represent the output of a renewable energy plant, such as an industrial wind power facility, and they can be sold in addition to the actual energy produced. They were invented by Enron to increase the possible sources of revenue for wind plants.

But buying green tags does not add renewable energy to the grid, because that energy was already sold to the grid.

As National Wind Watch board member Eric Rosenbloom says, "It's as if a grocery store sold a box of cereal to someone but keeps the box to sell later to someone else. The first customer gets the cereal (and the prize), and the second customer just gets the empty box. You can put it on your shelf and tell people you bought a box of cereal, but in fact you did not."

In buying green tags, an organization thereby supports wind energy projects by providing them with extra money. That is all that can be claimed. They are not buying wind energy -- neither for themselves nor for others.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Israel out of control

Here are some Israeli girls writing notes on missiles to the people of Lebanon.


And here's one of the recipients.



Alexander Cockburn has written an excellent background piece at Counterpunch about Israel's attack on Lebanon. He looks at the already forgotten history of a few weeks before Hezbollah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.

... June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we're really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That's just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets . . . But no! Israel doesn't regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn't even bother to pretend to regret. It says, "We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the 'peace process.'"

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they're not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. ...

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far ... In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn't want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided to chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel's northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there'd been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon's forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2:42 and 3:38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel's case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its "fence." Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. ...

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can't endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it's the only thing they know how to do.